South Park Revamped Online

South Park Digital Studios LLC, a joint venture of series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone and Comedy Central, today announced the launch of the new southparkstudios.com. Sponsored by Toyota and Virgin, the site features free, streaming, full-length episodes and clips from the entire 12 seasons of the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning animated series. A beta version went live last Wednesday and has already received more than 3 million page views, 2 million video plays, and a million streams of full episodes, according to MTV Networks’ Entertainment Group.

Designed by a South Park creative team in conjunction with Schematic, a WWP Digital Company, the new site currently offers 168 of 169 episodes of the series. Due to contractual obligations, all new installments will be uploaded after they premiere on Comedy Central, and will remain available for only seven days. These episodes will return to the site permanently 30 days after their TV premieres.

Commenting on the launch, Stone and Parker quip, ‘We got really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time, so we gave ourselves a legal alternative.”

“One goal in moving forward is to make every episode of South Park available worldwide,’ adds Anne Garefino, general manager of South Park Digital Studios. ‘Currently, full episodes are not available in the U.K., Australia and a few other foreign territories, but we’re not far off from making that happen. We have some contractual issues to sift through but we’re getting there.’

Southparkstudios.com also features extensive video and behind-the-scenes information from all 12 seasons. In addition, the development team worked with 65 Media to create the South Park Avatar Generator, which allows users to choose from millions of combinations in creating a self portrait in the signature South Park style. Approximately 35,000 Avatars have been created to date.